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Nov 25, 2010

The explanation I had always heard for the term "Black Friday" that this was the time of the year that retailers were finally "in the black" (making a profit) rather than "in the red" (still paying off their investments and overhead).

Let's just think about that for a moment. From January to November, that's eleven months spent in the red. Even if your fiscal year starts in March or June (as some do), that's still quite a few months in the red.

I don't know if this is accurate or not. But it does make me feel a little better about still being "in the red" myself vis-a-vis my book. My fiscal year, so to speak, only started at the end of October. If you'd like a good Thanksgiving read, or something to enjoy while waiting in line with your kindle on Black Friday, you can click on my anthology Conmergence: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction or one of the other great books on the side of my page. I'm still trying to reach my own personal Black Friday moment. :)

Now let's talk about something completely different, how to buy presents for men.

Every year I put a lot of thought into buying a present for my husband and every year it is a complete and utter bust. This year will be no different. The problem is that the only thing he wants are geeky tech toys, and he only wants them if they are on sale for crazy low prices, and he is the only one able to (a) know what version/brand/ram/whatever is the EXACT AND ONLY one that he wants, and (b) what price is low enough to be a GOOD price. If I buy him the wrong thing and/or at the wrong price, it just makes him miserable, and this is not the purpose of a present.

He doesn't make it easy for me either. For instance, this year, he wanted something I could have managed to order: a Nook. Yes, the one electronic gadget I know something about, an e-reader. So what does he do? He bought for himself and it arrived yesterday.

Then he mentioned, casually, that he wanted Apple TV. And yes, you guessed it, told me he had ordered it already. Um, thanks.

Now, I've tried other types of things. Tools. Clothes. A candy-pooping moose. Once I bought him tickets to Wicked. When he objected that we couldn't afford that, especially for THOSE seats, I proudly showed him the receipt showing the wonderful deal I'd found. He was happy that I'd started to think frugally. It seemed like this gift would be a winner.

We forgot to go.

Knowing we had an opportunity, and spent the money, and blew it, upsets me to this day, more so than if I hadn't ever bought the tickets. (The human mind is strange that way.) So I will never do that again.

This is getting frustrating to me. If I buy him tools, he doesn't use them, if I buy him clothes, he doesn't wear them, if books, he doesn't read them. He didn't even eat the candy from the pooping moose.

I found a good deal on Amazon (75% off). I know I can post it here, because my husband does not read my blog. (I am trusting the discretion of those of you in my family who do read the blog not to mention it to him.

My reasoning is this: (a) we need new sheets, and (b) I know he will use the sheets because I am the one who makes the bed.

Does anyone else have this problem? What gifts do you get for the person, not who has everything, but is nonetheless very, very hard to buy presents for?

Nov 23, 2010

Orson Scott Card. What can I say? The name is pretty much the sell here, isn't it? So the trailer is smooth and professional, and though it has motion, mostly stays out of the way of just letting you know the author of Ender's Game has a new book out.

Nov 16, 2010

I've been reading Dean Wesley Smith's blog about publishing, and the Velocity of Sales vs The Long Tail. Traditionally, your book was sold as though it were a banana:

Now, understand, in a grocery store, produce is put out to be sold quickly and then is replaced before it spoils.

Over the last twenty plus years publishers and bookstores put out books and then yanked them quickly as if a book would spoil in a week or two. They treated books exactly the same as produce. And guess what, just as with produce in a grocery story, if a book didn’t sell, it was tossed away, destroyed.

This practice has become so bad that often a book will be deemed out of print within a month of the release date because it didn’t have the orders the sales force was expecting. Or it didn’t have the number of projected sales in the first week or so. Of course, it won’t officially go out of print until all the warehouse stock is gone, but it will have a do-not-reprint order on the book from almost week one.

But the one thing modern publishers and big bookstore have forgotten:

Books don’t spoil.

Treating books like bananas has resulted in a lot of lost book sales, canceled series and even ruined authorial careers. (It also explains why I couldn't find all of the books of his wife's Fey series.)

He concludes:

So what’s happening outside of traditional publishing?

Basically, a huge wave is happening. Many, many authors are figuring this new model out. Many, many small publishers are figuring this out, publishers who can turn their ships quickly. Many small publishers are springing into life to fill this void with a new business model and help writers.

...And as an old time writer, I haven’t been this excited in thirty years about writing new stuff. It’s a great time to be a writer. Finally our work will no longer be treated as produce and any reader who wants to find a story will be able to find it. Even twenty or thirty years from now.

On a related note, Ian Fleming's James Bond E-Books will bypass the print publisher. It's been predicted for a while now that Big Name Authors would figure out they could do better going straight to the source.

"Penguin accepted long ago that they didn't have the digital rights. Of course they wanted to do it, but why would we? With a brand like ours, people are looking for the books anyway, so the publicity and marketing will happen. It also gives us greater clarity of sales, which books are selling and where. We are very lucky to have such a big brand."

Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it's likely to produce more novels I'd want to read. (That said, it has generated one hit, and a big one: "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen, who apparently took the part about revision to heart.) The last thing the world needs is more bad books. But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced.

Here's why: NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it's largely unnecessary. When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in. "Write Your Novel Here" was the suggested motto for an in-store NaNoWriMo event. It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

...Frankly, there are already more than enough novels out there -- more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it's our job to do so. This is not to say that I don't hope that more novels will be written, particularly by the two dozen-odd authors whose new books I invariably snatch up with a suppressed squeal of excitement. (Actually, there are more of those novels than I'll ever be able to read, as well.) Furthermore, I know that there are still undiscovered or unpublished authors out there whose work I will love if I ever manage to find it. But I'm confident those novels would still get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth.

Yet while there's no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant -- publication by a major house -- will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

So I'm not worried about all the books that won't get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on.

I love her article because it's like those 19th Century sermons justifying slavery. It's so full of wrong-headed nonsense that it's downright inspiring.

The first question that comes to mind is, even if NaNoWriMo filled the world with books, so what? As Nerdshares asked,

Is it sad that Twilight exists? I don’t know. I don’t like it. I think it’s legitimately an awful piece of work, but I also don’t know that I’d feel comfortable telling Stephenie Meyer to stick her manuscripts in a drawer because it’s no good so why try? (I think because this, which Laura Miller doesn’t seem to understand, is what we would call being an asshole.)

Miller seems to suggest that it’s wrong to encourage the idea that everybody can and should write (particularly, she argues, since writers will insist on doing it anyway), but by that logic you may as well not encourage everyone to read either. That was received wisdom of much of Miller’s counterparts in the pundit class of the 18th century, when it was widely believed that dimwit readers and their vulgar tastes were leading to the destruction of the world of letters.

So why do we keep hearing that there are too many books? If it's not NaNo that's being derided, it's some other phenomena, like the Kindle. Dana Gioia and Jonathan Franzen are fretting that an ereader like the Kindle, "will not make a significant positive impact, however well it does business-wise.” Franzen thinks you can read travel books on the Kindle, but not Kafka. (Which is weird, because I thought Kafka wrote travel books. Something about touring castles? Or maybe it was penal colonies? Anyway, I read Kafka while I was touring Europe, and it sure would have helped to have it on my Kindle. And in English.)

Or alternatively, it's self-publishing that is blamed for an anticipated tsunami of awful books. Oh my goodness, that was Laura Miller in Salon also. "Again, these developments are in many ways great for authors. Readers, however, may be in for a serious case of slush fatigue."

But Miller isn't the only one desperate to save readers from being overwhelmed by having too much to read. In a great article on a completely different subject (the lost art of rejection letters -- it's really interesting!) Bill Morris suddenly and inexplicably declares:

We need fewer books, and better ones; we need more readers, and smarter ones. And I believe the former would lead to the latter.

I couldn't disagree more.

An individual does not become a good writer by writing less, but by writing more, by writing and writing and writing. It's said that you have to write a million words of dreck before you can master the craft. If that's true of writers in the singular, why wouldn't it be true of writers in the plural? Why wouldn't it be true of a civilization?

Countries that win the Olympics year after year are countries that have the most athletes practicing those sports, not just at the Olympic level but across the board. Thousands and thousands of amateur athletes are needed if a country is to produce just a few gold-medalists.

The same is true of inventions. You don't just invent the airplane by favoring only one or two of the smartest inventors. You have as many inventors, smart and moronic and everything in between, striving to fly. They learn from each other and they compete with each other and they spur each other on. Soon you're flying.

If every person in the world wrote a book, that would be awesome, wouldn't it? I think it would. The very people who are the least likely to write a book are holding secret inside them some of the books I would most like to read. The African mother who would, if she could, leave a story for her child before she dies of AIDS and leaves the child an orphan. The Russian dude who could tell me what it's really like to go from working for the KGB to an independent mafia. And then there are all the imagined worlds which I can't even imagine because only someone else could. I wish I could read those books. Why don't Miller and Morris?

I think they fear more books because a couple of different issues are operating here.

(1) No one reader can read everything. People who have an obsessive-compulsive desire to read every book ever written (I really sympathize with this) can find it frustrating that the task is already IMPOSSIBLE but just keeps getting more so because darn authors keep writing more. Just look at the number of books selling more than 100,000 copies I listed in a previous post. Have you read all of those? Neither have I.

(2) If you are an author (as Miller, Morris, Franzen etc. are) then all those new books being written during NaNo, published through Smashwords and read on ereaders are COMPETITION. Of course authors don't want more competition. Even though Konrath claims it's not a competition. Readers are finite, with finite reading time. It's hard not to worry that with so many other good books out there, ours would get overlooked.

Notice that the real problem, then, is not that there might be too many BAD books out there. The problem is that there might be too many GOOD books out there. There are wonderful books you won't have time to read. That is heartbreaking, isn't? And someone else might have written a much, much better book than you. In fact, probably hundreds of authors have written better books than you.

And yet, there is one more important truth:

No one but you can write your book.

Unlike Miller, I think that would be a loss. Because unlike the naysayers, who think literate culture is on the brink of self-implosion, I think we are in the midst of a wonderful renaissance of literature. Historians centuries from now will look back on our era and marvel at the burst of creativity. They will point to the huge number of novels, both horrendous and gorgeous, the flurry of interest ordinary people, not even professional writers, are taking in learning how to write novels, the communities, like NaNoWriMo (but not limited to it) that have sprung up to make writing novels a social activity.

Let me repeat that... writing novels is a social activity. Look, that is astonishing. Hey, let's be friends: we'll all write 50,000 words expressing our deepest feelings in the form of a story and share it with one another. This is art; this is friendship; this is community; this is amazing. I love human beings for doing this.

We are not becoming an illiterate culture. We are becoming more imbricated with the written word than ever. Our daily social lives revolve around the written word more than ever before. No wonder more people than ever, not less, are reading.

Do let us share our novels with one another. Do let us buy the books our friends write, and read them, and write about them, and be inspired by them. Do let us create a community of the written word to communicate our soul aches and heart breaks and dream aims through the secret language of story -- both the oldest and now the newest way to share with one another.

Nov 7, 2010

Amazon sells the Nook -- one of the lead rivals for their own Kindle. For $223. New from Barnes & Noble, the Nook is $149. What is going on here? Is it a sneaky way for Amazon to suggest to casual searchers that the Nook is a lot more expensive than the Kindle? Or is it just because it's from a third party vendor? But why does a third party vendor thing they can sell the Nook for so much?

This is a simple trailer. There is a solid soundtrack, a few strong images and logical, enticing content that gives enough information to provide some idea of the worldbuidling without overwhelming us with details. I like that the theme is a strong component of the hook. Can good overcome evil without becoming evil? It may be objected that this is not an original theme. I have yet to meet a good theme that was "original." The best themes are not original; they are eternal.

Nov 2, 2010

Proponents of the Singularity believe that humans will one day transcend biology. There are different versions, but one theory is that humans will all become uploaded into digitally stored data strings, existing in a purely virtual environment.

But another Singularity Event does appear to be nigh. The Book Singularity. Books will transcend their traditional physical form, and become not just different, but more than they were.

Is the Book Singularity at hand? Libroid thinks so, and has some alternatives for the hyper-book future:

Enter Libroid, which creator Neffe -- a veteran journalist for Germany's Der Spiegel magazine and author of a best-selling book on Charles Darwin -- hopes will beat its own path to success.

The program, which currently runs only on Apple's iPad tablet computer, splits the traditional book page into three columns, allowing authors space to annotate their text with footnotes, images, maps, videos and web links.

Libroid delivers the book's core text in the middle of the page. Two smaller columns on either side carry the extra content. Page numbers are abandoned in favor of a percentage bar that tells readers where they are.

Interactive elements allow readers to make their own comments on virtual book clubs that can be linked up to the text. It also offers authors the possibility of updating their own work (something that U.S. author Jonathan Franzen might appreciate after the wrong draft of his latest novel was published in the UK).

With Libroid publications also allowing readers to flit between different translations of the text, Neffe said he believes the added extras, plus a lower price tag, will set it apart from standard e-books.

Though circumspect about its chances for success, he said it does have several major selling points, not least the potential to generate a new medium for fiction writers who, he says, are already lining up to try it out.

This is standard enhanced book stuff. Okay, I'm saying "standard" even though enhanced books are far from standard yet! But this part was not new to me. However, this was:

Neffe agrees, saying although he has been bombarded by suggestions from authors, he is choosing carefully. One winning idea, he says, is the "round book."

"Round books are those with no beginning and no end. Experienced authors tell me they have problems because every linear story has centrifugal forces that try to get out from the center.

"There is a well-known author in Germany who writes crime stories. He wants to randomly mix chapters so you would be the judge in the criminal case.

"You get nine different reports from witnesses and when you shake it up, they will mix up, so you always start with different one. Every reader is having a different experience."

Joe Konrath has written a send-up of one of these, what he calls, "Write Your Own Damn Story" Adventure which he claims will, "push ebook technology to the boundaries of reading enjoyment, or something like that."

Much as I love 'em, these kind of books do have one drawback, which is that they break the fourth wall. That works for some stories, especially funny ones, but usually I like to immerse myself in the world of the book. I like the feeling it is all "real" on its own terms, that there is a certain way it "actually" happened.

However, the "round book" idea is different from the choose-your-story idea. The round book can still assume there was a "true" history, a "way it really happened." The illusion of fact, the fourth wall, can remain intact. All that changes are the order in which you discover them. It's as if you were given an easy option to watch Lost in either the order shown or actual chronological order, or some other order in which the events make actual sense. (And if you figure out what that is, please tell me.)

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